Resources

The debate about whether or not to engage in online education is over. However, the journey to doing online education well is just beginning. This video points our the reasons we should be embracing online education. It also gives a few pointers about one of the most popular forms of professor presentation, the screencast.   Watch the screencast at this link.

Anyone who has been teaching for a while knows that stress is normal for our vocation. When stress is prolonged over a long period of time, we experience exhaustion. Online instruction can compound the effects of mental, emotional, and even physical exhaustion because of course design that extends the time for planning, preparing, and implementing a course. Managing Your Online Instruction I don’t feel like an expert on self-care, but I have learned some healthy habits to keep teaching online not only manageable, but rewarding. Here is what I have learned so far. 1. Plan ahead and give yourself ample time for course design in online instruction. The largest and most long-term online project I have tackled is, by far, reinvigorating my institution’s distant learners Greek language program. From designing and creating a two-course sequence to implementing and teaching it online, it was a project that lasted a full year. When I started, I had already taught beginning Greek in a traditional F2F on-campus classroom setting for over 10 years. Converting my existing F2F class into a new asynchronous course on the Canvas learning management system (LMS) was a challenge. I had a head start since I had already laid out the course content in my traditional F2F class. This spared me the extra stress and work of trying to plan the course from scratch. Instead, I focused on understanding best online instruction pedagogical practices and implementing new technology. I had to create and produce over 80+ instructional videos, learn how to use the video-conferencing technology for Greek tutoring, and design assignments that made use of Canvas’ full features which included online quizzes. The course design took the entire summer. 3 intense months. It would have taken longer if I had not the experience and past resources of having taught the class beforehand. Whatever you do, plan ahead. You need at least a month to plan out a course and another three to create it on your institution’s LMS. If you don’t give yourself ample time for course design, you will exhaust yourself from creating the course and not have much reserve to teach it. 2. Set aside a no-work day for yourself while implementing the course. Pick one day a week and let students know that on that day, you will be offline not answering any correspondence. We all need a Sabbath space in our weekly schedule to pull away from our work and rest. I have found Saturdays to be the best day off. It affords me time to spend with family and friends. Sundays never worked for me. They tend be days when students scramble to finish their assignments online prior to deadlines on Monday. Know what days work and don’t work for your schedule. Pick a Sabbath day and make it sacred. If you let students know ahead of time, they will honor your day off and expect a response to their queries later. 3. Recharge your motivation for teaching. What makes online instruction a rewarding experience for you? Some of my colleagues enjoy the research and reading that comes with preparing a class. Others, like myself, need a personal connection with students to stay motivated. Whatever the source of inspiration, turn back to it periodically to recharge your enthusiasm for the course. Take the opportunities to stay inspired as they arise. When I was attending an annual denominational event during the Winter break, I learned that a number of my online students would be attending the conference. We met at a local Starbucks simply to connect. We talked about all things Greek and New Testament. But I also learned about their stories and ministries. I heard what they loved about the course and why they wanted to learn the biblical languages. What they shared that day renewed my desire and motivation to teach. Mental exhaustion gave way to rekindled inspiration. I was ready to tackle the rest of semester. 4. Practice the spiritual disciplines faithfully. Here I’m writing to theological educators. We all have our favorite spiritual disciplines: a daily devotional, times of prayer, morning or mid-day offices, or walks for reflection and meditation. I have found walks an important way to reflect on my vocation and pray for students. Whatever your spiritual tradition, observe it faithfully and experience the grace to persevere through even the toughest of semesters.

I have just experienced a new first in my teaching career: This week I had to re-design a course for a face-to-face format from an online format. I recently switched jobs. After teaching for half a dozen years in a school that exists primarily online, I am now back in a residential context, working for a school that exists primarily on a brick-and-mortar campus. I have been invited to teach a course next year, and I thought it would be a simple matter to adapt one I had offered at my previous institution. So, without hesitation, I accepted the invitation. Then, the Registrar asked me if I could teach in the school’s evening program—one class session per week for 2’45”. Two hours and forty-five minutes?! I realized with a gasp that I no longer knew what I would do with such a sustained block of time. Lengthy lectures are a thing of my distant past. When I first started teaching online, I had to work to pare my presentations down to twenty minutes. Recently, I attended a workshop where I learned that the average student attention span--before the mind starts wandering--is something like nine minutes. “Limit your presentations to twelve minutes, max,” the leader admonished us, “and even then, make them funny or catchy in some way.” Discussion, of course, can use up a lot of minutes. But there, too, I have become accustomed to disciplined time management. I developed the habit of checking in to my online course discussions daily, spending only about thirty minutes monitoring and guiding each thread; an hour, max. Online courses have so many elements to attend to that online instructors learn not to get sucked too deeply into every discussion. I forced myself to recall what I used to do in the old days of classroom teaching because I had a vague memory of class sessions flying by with never enough time before students were stuffing their books into backpacks and dashing out the door. Oh, right: Debates. Case study exercises. Role plays. Problem-solving. Guest speakers. In-class writing. All of which, I realized, I had at one point modified for the online environment. Versions of these learning activities still populated my syllabi; it was just that they happened in smaller chunks, spread throughout a week rather than concentrated in an evening. In addition to how differently time gets used in online vs. face-to-face teaching, my conversation with the Registrar also brought to mind the difference between virtual and live presence. I realized that I would once again have to muster up the energy to regularly face a room full of live bodies. Would I have to stand on my feet in front of them the whole time? Would they sit there and stare at me? I recalled the adrenaline rush that always made my palms a little sweaty before walking into class and the dissipation that left me feeling drained for several hours afterward. For six years my body had been spared all that. You don’t get particularly nervous sitting in your familiar, quiet office reading discussion posts, watching videos, and answering emails. And if for some reason you do, you can always take a break and leave for a walk or a snack or even some errands, with no one becoming the wiser. Speaking of quiet, I started recalling how noisy classrooms could sometimes become. Or, worse yet, pin-drop silent. I sighed, remembering the dual agonies of having to cajole speech out of taciturn participants and having to serve as traffic cop during swift-moving exchanges where everyone talked at once. Like all students, online students naturally vary in terms of their participation levels, but the format makes it possible to require that all of them contribute at least the same minimum to every activity. As another blogger in this series put it, “Discussion dynamics online become more democratic when each student is equally invited and expected to contribute to conversation” (Miriam Y. Perkins, “How Teaching Online Enhances Residential Pedagogies: The Big Picture,” Online Teaching, Online Learning, February 12, 2019). I am confident that come next year when I am teaching again in a traditional classroom, I will re-adapt, and eventually relish the immediacy and liveliness and spontaneity it affords. But I am also reasonably confident that I will miss the steady, measured egalitarianism of my former online world, and the kind of teaching it made possible.

As an online instructor who understands the rigors of course design and management, I often wonder if it would be easier to livestream a class through video conferencing, rather than prepare an asynchronous course module by module. In a Hamlet-esque way, I ask: “whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the outrage of course design, or to storm through a sea of troubles by streaming?” In this post, I talk about the perils and advantages of video conferencing a class each week.  First, the challenges and in conclusion, the draw. One, I’m terrible at multi-tasking and with video conferencing, the instructor has to teach the course content and manage the live stream. On my debut day of teaching a live-streamed course for 25 seminarians, several could not log in . Some had audio, but no video. Others had video, but no audio. I spent the first 30 minutes of class trying to get everyone functional. I called IT for help. It was rough. My recommendation is to meet with students a week before class starts to work out technical problems. Help students log in correctly and explain the essentials of video conferencing, such as how to mute the microphone or share their video screen. Make it fun! Prepare ice-breaker questions, ask students to take turns muting and unmuting their microphones, hear everyone’s stories, and share family photos from your desktop. Getting the kinks out of video conferencing in a pre-class session is far less stressful than managing tech hiccups on the first day. Two, how do you manage discussion among 25 people or more in a live-stream setting? If your video conferencing platform does not have a ‘breakout’ feature, then establishing an etiquette for dialogue is crucial. Everyone should have a headset-with-microphone set up to prevent hearing each other’s feedback when speaking. The more people in a session, the more likely one will hear static feedback and background noise. Ask students to keep their microphone on mute and only when someone is speaking should one enable the mic. If your video conferencing session has a ‘breakout’ feature, use it! When I was teaching at another institution last fall, the school paid for the full features of Zoom, a popular business conferencing platform. Zoom had a nifty feature: with a click of a button, it would divide the class into small groups. Zoom sent the students out of the main session and into their own private video-conferences. The instructor can set the number of groups and for how long they meet. When their breakout session ends, students are sent back into the main class. Then I had each group share briefly what they discussed and we continued our time together. Finally, with above two challenges alone, even the casual observer can understand that livestreaming a class is hard work. There is no flexibility in the delivery of the course content. Most of the course is delivered during the three hours the class meets each week. If the technology fails, that day’s session is lost. So are there any advantages? A few. With streaming, less work is done on course design. Some instructors might prefer to spend most of their time teaching the class during the term than designing the course module by module before the term begins. Most important, I do think that video conferencing provides a more immediate relational connection between the instructor and students. It helps me to see the students, talk with them face-to-face, interact with them each week, and watch them enjoy what they learn. I experience the same with an asynchronous class, but the process is slower. To stream or not to stream? I’m still deciding which is better. For now, it might be a tie.